In this article, Mario Sylvander explores how to unleash the potential of students through self-entrepreneurial learning and how empowering them as primary drivers of education is crucial for their success
While there are many virtues to inspire, teach and nurture in students, school achievement and success hinges upon self-entrepreneurial (self-e) learning approaches, starting with the empowerment of students as the primary drivers of their education. The more educators support student voice and ownership of the school experience, the more students are freed to develop and activate their curiosities; and the less students may feel that their school experience is one of required pressures, expectations, conformism, and dutifulness.
Schools should endeavor to transform and build institutional learning and practices, approaches, and policies into those that engender community empowerment and voice, intrinsic motivation, and self-e learning. Awareness is rising toward changes to the traditional paradigm wherein responsibility for one’s day-to-day education trajectory is largely outsourced to teachers, well-meaning as they may be. Self-efficacy, growth mindset, internal locus of control — these point toward self-entrepreneurship, that essential set of skills, behaviors, and attitudes that activate curiosity and exercise drive and responsibility for the building of one’s most important enterprise: one’s own education.
To be self-e is to activate one’s ideas, disrupt one’s environment to innovate, put oneself out there to potentially fail but to always learn from efforts to master and succeed with one’s (learning) goals. And all this without the crutch or excuse that one needs a teacher to prompt these behaviors. Entrepreneurs may be born, but they can and must also be made.
Schools are people — many kinds of people in many kinds of roles
Enter schooling. Not traditional schooling that measures “achievement” by how well one responds to steady streams of dictates- -what, when, and how to study — but by the soft skills one brings to bear to learn. Secondary schools should aim significant focus on soft-skill self-e development and extension in students. Empowering them to be the primary drivers of the education they are gaining is a significant, but not impossible, challenge.
Student responses to the education paradigm begin in primary school. Consider how teachers and schools begin shaping student understanding of how to succeed in school, from this familiar, ubiquitous staple of the school experience: we all see, have seen, and/or remember the line-up of children to transition from the classroom to, say, the art room or the cafeteria. Guidance from the teacher and “success” with this behavior tends to come from getting from point A to point B in tight, disciplined, efficient formation: staying in line, not talking, keeping up with the person in front. What if teachers said to students, “Please go to the [art] room to start class in a few minutes. You may go there how you wish.” One paradigm is about control and conforming to dictates; the other is about giving a goal and leaving it to students to reach it in the way they choose. The repetition of one or the other paradigm across the school experience means that kids internalize it.
The way teachers teach students will flow quite directly from the way the school leadership leads teachers, incidentally. The paradigm of the relationship of leadership to faculty and staff may also tend toward the tight, efficient, scripted line from point A to point B.
Schools are people — many kinds of people in many kinds of roles. Their motivation, as well presented by Daniel Pink, will coincide with the degree to which they see their goal(s) clearly, the degree to which they have autonomy to pursue them, and the degree to which they perceive limits to how much they can/should do/learn. The exercise of our motivation will develop as a function of how we are guided to learn and guided how to learn. We are all entrepreneurs of ourselves in one way or another. To be “self-e” in school is much easier if the school operates from a paradigm where the development of self-entrepreneurial learning approaches and attitudes is understood and made a priority.
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